Just stay home, scientologists

Poor Haiti. First the earthquake, and now the cult vultures are descending on them. It’s not just talking bibles: now the scientologists are coming.

Seriously, people. When a region suffers a disaster and the infrastructure is falling down in ruins and people need real help now, when the pipeline is limited and access is difficult, send in the experts (doctors and engineers, for instance) and immediately useful aid (medicine, food, drinking water), and all the peddlers of frivolous non-essentials should just stay out of the way. A box of e-meters is taking up space better spent on a box of antibiotics; a scientology auditor is displacing a doctor.

Hairy horde marches on

I just stagger back from yet another long day of travel, and what do I discover? You’ve filled up the las entry in the endless thread again. Does the horde never sleep?

Anyway, we will launch this one with a mystery. Watch this video of an Oregon bigfoot:

Now the mystery. Why is it that all sightings of bigfoot are such obvious scams? They are typically badly done messes like a poor and shaky camera recording, or a pile of rotting meat in a fur suit. This one suffers from overly slick choreography — isn’t it nice how the camera zooms into focus only briefly, just as Bigfoot turns to look at the cameraman? At least this guy invested in a nice hairy man suit and put some effort into the makeup, but it’s still a guy in a costume.

And wait — the creator’s name is “John E. Walker”? Yeah, right.

As if you need anything to talk about, at least you can start by ripping into this video. I have no idea where you’ll end up from there, of course.

Goofy gadget, falsified by SCIENCE!

RCA (which is not the old and reputable company I remember, but has gone out of business and its name sold to anyone with the right amount of cash) recently announced a device called the Airnergy harvester, which supposedly simply soaks up the RF energy emitted by WiFi devices in the neighborhood and uses it to charge portable batteries. Wow, what an idea…but a moment’s thought makes it clear it can’t work. My local wireless router simply can’t be pumping out that much energy, or it would an awesomely wasteful device, and there can’t be that much power floating free in every few cubic inches of my home. Fortunately, one of the commenters at that site did the math and made it explicit. Don’t you just love math? It’s so powerful and so handy.

Here’s some math. Long story short, by my calculations, 100% efficiency and absorption at 5 feet away from a 100mW home router, (reasonable figures), it would take 34.5 years to charge that blackberry battery.

It’s not a Dyson Sphere, so you only get the power that hits the antenna.
Surface of a sphere = 4pir^2, r = 60″ (5 feet).
Surface area of a 5′ sphere = 45,216 square inches.

The device appears about 2″ x 3″ = 6 square inches.
The device then picks up, best case, 0.000133 of the power out from the router, which is 100mW, so.. 0.0133mW

If you leave it there for 24 hours, 0.0318 mWh are stored.
According to Will’s battery, it has ~4,000 mWh capacity.

So, it would take 12,579 days, or 34.5 years, to charge your blackberry battery once, presuming 100% absorption, no losses.

I call BS. Even adding up all the laptops, cell phones, routers, portable phones, everything, all the noise in the RF spectrum that could hit that device, I don’t see it charging the internal battery even in a week.

Ah, reality.

For a dose of unreality, though, read through the comments there. The earliest are all fast explanations of the lack of plausibility of the device, and then what happens? It alternates between clueless dopes saying, “Awesome! I want one of those!” and exasperated skeptics saying, “Read the comments up top, it can’t work!”

Cancer is a disease

Barbara Ehrenreich had breast cancer, and ugly and frightening as that disease is, she found something else that was almost as horrible: the ‘positive thinking’ approach to health care. People are stigmatized if they fail to regard their illness as anything other than an uplifting, positive life experience, an opportunity to examine their lives and identify what is most important to them…and also, most disturbingly, if they fail to appreciate that the attitude that they bring to the problem will determine whether they live or die. It’s the Oprah-zation of medicine.

In the most extreme characterisation, breast cancer is not a problem at all, not even an annoyance – it is a “gift”, deserving of the most heartfelt gratitude. One survivor writes in her book The Gift Of Cancer: A Call To Awakening that “cancer is your ticket to your real life. Cancer is your passport to the life you were truly meant to live.” And if that is not enough to make you want to go out and get an injection of live cancer cells, she insists, “Cancer will lead you to God. Let me say that again. Cancer is your connection to the Divine.”

Well, doesn’t that just make you all want to rush out and take a bath in some carcinogens? We healthy people are missing out on enlightenment!

We’re also missing out on an opportunity to be bilked. That’s what this is really all about: con artists who can’t really do anything to fight the cancer can at least tell you to smile, be cheerful, pray, buy my super-duper vitamin supplements, and pay the cashier my consulting fees on the way out … and if it doesn’t work, it’s not my fault. You’ve got a disease that’s ripping through your guts and causing pain, yet if you feel a moment’s doubt or worry, you’ve invalidated the charlatan’s prescription, and your relapse is all your fault.

This is where the feel-good phonies prosper. Look at how Deepak Chopra treats his ‘patients’.

Besides, it takes effort to maintain the upbeat demeanor expected by others – effort that can no longer be justified as a contribution to long-term survival. Consider the woman who wrote to Deepak Chopra that her breast cancer had spread to the bones and lungs: “Even though I follow the treatments, have come a long way in unburdening myself of toxic feelings, have forgiven everyone, changed my lifestyle to include meditation, prayer, proper diet, exercise, and supplements, the cancer keeps coming back. Am I missing a lesson here that it keeps reoccurring? I am positive I am going to beat it, yet it does get harder with each diagnosis to keep a positive attitude.”

Chopra’s response: “As far as I can tell, you are doing all the right things to recover. You just have to continue doing them until the cancer is gone for good. I know it is discouraging to make great progress only to have it come back again, but sometimes cancer is simply very pernicious and requires the utmost diligence and persistence to eventually overcome it.”

The poor woman has a metastisizing cancer that has spread to her bones and lungs, and Chopra is telling her that diet, prayer, and not thinking ‘toxic’ thoughts will lead to a cure! I don’t know how that quack has avoided arrest.

I much prefer the honesty of Ehrenreich (I also like the connotations of her name). This is the truth:

Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift”, was a very personal, agonising encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before – one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune and blame only ourselves for our fate.

Nice debunking of biocentrism

Robert Lanza and Deepak Chopra (just the fact that he is associated with it should discredit it right there) have been peddling this bizarre notion of Biocentrism, the idea that the universe is the product of human awareness — it’s a kind of upscale version of The Secret, gussied up with more science vocabulary. The gang at Nirmukta have put together a long dissection of Lanza’s bad physics, well worth a read.

What do Fox News and the Huffington Post have in common?

A fondness for quacks.

Fox News brought on a naturopath to peddle a random bit of nonsense, that coffee makes you fat. Any drug that tinkers with your metabolism can have some unexpected effects, but to claim that a cup of black coffee is “worse than five hot fudge sundaes” is irresponsible insanity.

In other woo news: Fox News invited Ann de Wees Allen to tell its viewers that black coffee will make you “fatter than a pig.” This segment is a textbook example of how not to do science journalism. The voice over identifies de Wees Allen as “Doctor”–without mentioning that she claims neither a medical degree, nor a doctorate. Her website says she’s a doctor of naturopathy. Fox also neglects to mention that Allen appears to have a sideline selling something called “Skinny Coffee”–an alternative to that fattening old joe.

Meanwhile, the HuffPo continues its adoration of homeopathy. No, not homeopathy: the quacks have come up with a new, impressive, pseudoscientific term for it now. It’s Nanopharmacology. It’s all wrapped up in a primer on quackery.

Homeopathic medicines are made through a specific pharmacological process of dilution and vigorous shaking. However, when skeptics say that there is nothing but water in homeopathic medicine, they are proving their ignorance, despite the incredible arrogance in which they make these assertions.

The skeptics aren’t making arrogant assertions: the homeopaths who are bilking people with useless nostrums are. Here’s a good reply to homeopathy:

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GOATS ON FIRE!

Kooks are like stray cats: give them a little bit of attention, and they end up following you everywhere, making annoying squalling noises and clawing at your door. A perfect example is David Mabus aka Dennis Markuze aka That Insane Prat, who, now that registration is a barrier to posting his little kook-droppings here, has taken to trying to flood my mailbox. Ha ha, the laugh is on him, my mailbox is already flooded! Also, I’ve got filters up the wazoo there, anyway.

There a whole lot of skeptics (and the entire faculty of the University of Minnesota Morris, too, who have marveled and laughed at is output) who have been getting these lunatic emails, but I just filter them and delete them. However, Rebecca Watson has pointed out one felicitous random phrase from his recent eruption: GOATS ON FIRE! It’s just sitting there. I have no idea what he’s talking about. But it does seem to me to be a useful term for flagging weird stuff, so I’ve added it to my email filters to highlight any comments that use the phrase. It’ll be handy for bringing the crazy to my attention…as long as you don’t abuse it.

And again, the stray cat effect: crazy David Cumming, author of the God Equation, really wants my attention, and sent me a four page summary of his reasoning. It was too long and too stupid, so I only skimmed it, but in case anyone else wants to add it to their cracked pot collection, I’ve scanned it in. No, don’t thank me. I’m just hoping one of you will shred it apart so that Cumming will follow you home.

It’s very GOATS ON FIRE! There is a section that asks, “Where is the science?”, but when I looked, there isn’t any there.

Changing of the guard

Hey, this is a surprise: Phil Plait is stepping down from the presidency of the JREF to pursue a career in television. Phil, I’ve seen your picture in the skepchick calendar — television isn’t ready for that kind of exposure yet! Well, maybe on Skinemax.

All hail the new president of the JREF, DJ Grothe. He’ll be a good match for the organization, and I look forward to future amazing meetings.

Roger Ebert is such a skeptic

He takes on our country’s curious attitude towards patent inanity.

We are edging into an Election Season where strange beliefs will get an unusual airing. Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee are up front in their disdain for Darwinism and their embrace of one degree or another of Creationism. Obama and most Democrats, and many Republicans have no problem at all with Darwinism, but will be wise to keep that out of their basic stump speech. Palin can draw applause by affirming she doesn’t believe mankind shared a common ancestor with oran utans, but Obama will prudently refrain from revealing his belief in the quite provable fact that we do.

It will be a fascinating aspect of the coverage of the approaching campaigns to watch how mainstream news organizations tread on this thin ice. There was an outcry in some circles when most news outlets were slow to simply state that George Bush was wrong about Brownie doin a great job, and Palin was wrong about the Bridge to Nowhere. They were wrong, but few in the MSM said they were, and even fewer, perhaps none, of those outlets will say that Palin or Huckabee are just plain wrong, wrong, wrong about Creationism. Not since Flat Earthers has there been a public dispute in which one side (Darwinism) has so throughly and merciless demolished the other (Creationism). Yet at most the MSM might venture to mention a “debate” or “controversy” between Darwinism and Creationism. News at 10: The debate about the theory of gravity.

He doesn’t just target the right-wing follies, either: the lefties get a skewering for their promotion of New Agey Nonsense. It’s a good read.

Rom Houben is still a victim

Yet more skeptics have spoken out: Randi, Orac, and Novella, on the case of the Belgian man who is claimed to have awakened from a persistent vegetative state, and is even, supposedly, writing a book about his 23 years trapped in an unresponsive body.

It’s possible that he has recovered to some degree, but the evidence hasn’t been shown. Supposedly, he was diagnosed to have some functionality with a poorly described brain mapping technique (one summary I read in Nature suggests that it was looking for areas of the brain that lit up in response to external stimuli, but there’s more to consciousness than that), and then the media is going ga-ga over Houben’s reported words…but he isn’t saying anything! It’s all done with this bogus “facilitated communication” nonsense, which is thoroughly unconvincing. There are videos of him tapping out answers with his eyes closed, guided by an assistant staring intently at the keyboard.

Here’s a simple test. He’s being asked questions in English and answering in Flemish. Find a facilitated communicator who doesn’t speak Flemish and have him or her do the same routine. I know what the result will be: either Houben will suddenly start answering in English, or the font of words will dry up.